THE POWER TO DESTROY

IRS stonewalls on emails about tea-party targets

'What they want is something that's going to take years to produce'

Published: 03/26/2014 at 1:08 PM

(WASHINGTON TIMES) IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Wednesday that he won’t be able to produce all of former employee Lois G. Lerner’s emails and those of other key employees by the end of this year, pushing it beyond this year’s congressional elections.

In a heated exchange over whether he and his tax agency employees are cooperating in Congress’s investigations into tea party targeting, Mr. Koskinen said the amount of time it will take to look through and redact private information from the documents could last years.

“What they want is something that’s going to take years to produce,” he told the House Oversight Committee, which six months ago issued a subpoena for Ms. Lerner’s emails because the IRS wasn’t acting quickly enough.